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How to collect HAProxy metrics

This article is a full tutorial on HAProxy monitoring and the best tools to get it done right. We will be looking into how to collect HAProxy metrics using a collectd daemon, push them into Graphite and visualize them in Grafana. To follow the steps in this blog, sign up for the MetricFire free trial, where you can use Graphite and Grafana directly in our platform.

Graphite vs. InfluxDB

Both Graphite and InfluxDB are time-series monitoring data platforms, both of which have high levels of adoption throughout many industries. Both of them are suitable for enterprise use, are scalable, and are stable. That being said, there are some benefits and drawbacks to each. While InfluxDB has many benefits, many developers still prefer Graphite due to its large community, stability, and reliability.

Integrating Grafana and CloudSQL

In this article, we are going to see how we can integrate Google Cloud with Grafana. We will integrate Google Cloud SQL with Grafana and plot the metrics on Grafana. We will also look at how we can use Google Stackdriver as the data source in Grafana to expose the metrics of Google Cloud VM’s and platforms. To use Grafana immediately, we will be using Hosted Grafana by MetricFire.

Top Networking Monitoring Tools

Businesses rely on accurate network monitoring data because the network is the backbone of your IT infrastructure. Lacking the means to communicate internally or externally about your network can be a disastrous situation, especially if you provide digital goods or services. Network monitoring tools shouldn’t be a “nice to have” thing which may or may not make this year’s department budget.

SolarWinds Alternatives

This week, an unfortunate incident got reported by the cybersecurity firm FireEye. According to FireEye, FireEye’s system was hacked via a product they were using, called Orion. Orion is SolarWinds’ most popular product, bringing in more than 50% of their revenue every year. It is believed that hackers funded by foreign governments compromised the networks of both public and private organizations via their SolarWinds monitoring service.

Kubernetes Namespaces: A Practical Guide

Kubernetes namespaces enable you to organize cluster objects, such as applications, devices and variables. Once you define namespaces, you can use this classification to filter, group and manage objects. You can use the same namespaces in duplicated environments and apply policies to specific clusters segments. Kubernetes namespaces are also important for defining roles and ensuring proper access configuration. If you're monitoring Kubernetes, you should try out MetricFire.

MetricFire vs. Datadog

Before we dive into the specifics of MetricFire vs. Datadog, let's address the most critical point: scaling. Datadog is great for users who need to do a little bit of everything, but Datadog's biggest weakness is scaling. Datadog can do logs, APM, time-series and more, but scaling time-series metrics, alerts, and servers will cause your monthly bill to escalate. The graph below shows what you pay at Datadog vs. MetricFire: Now, let's dive into MetricFire vs. Datadog, and their key comparisons.

Grafana Tutorial: Automating Common Grafana Actions

Grafana is probably the most popular visualization software and a Hosted Grafana is provided by MetricFire. Every day, our users have to perform certain actions and most of them are repetitive. For example, you might want to automatically create a bunch of different folders with dashboards in them. This tutorial will show you how to do that with Terraform, which is very popular in the DevOps circles, and how to go even further by using the client library yourself to automate more.

Grafana vs Chronograf: Pricing

Grafana vs InfluxDB – Both offer their cloud services for storing, visualizing and alerting on any kind of time-series data. Both cloud offerings differ from each other in various ways and follow distinct pricing strategies. In this article, we cover the details of Grafana as a service and InfluxDB Cloud, their features and benefits along with their pricing models. MetricFire is a Hosted Grafana service, where you can use Grafana dashboards directly in the MetricFire platform.

Sending metrics to MetricFire

Monitoring IT resources is part of the daily activities in large and medium-sized companies, but smaller companies also benefit from the advantages of monitoring systems, memory capacity, availability, and performance. The aim of such proactivity is to ensure smooth processes - for example, IT administrators need to know days in advance that disk space is becoming too low, so they can do something about it.